In recent years much attention has been given to the extension of wireless links to local area networks or other packet-based communication networks which normally consist of various forms of packet generating receiving and processing units linked by physical links constituted by, for example, twisted pair lines, coaxial cable or optical fibres. Various standards are being developed for the wireless communication of data to and from nodes which form part of a packet-based communication network. One such standard is known as ‘Bluetooth’. The present invention in a preferred form is intended to be compatible with a Bluetooth standard but the subject matter of the invention is applicable to other systems.
It is known, from the systems operating in accordance with the Bluetooth standard, to provide a ‘node’ which is capable of receiving and/or transmitting a radio frequency signal, preferably in the form of a spread spectrum signal with ‘frequency-hopped’ coding. Such a node includes high level packet processing functions so that the node is immediately compatible, for example, with an Ethernet network. In such a node, the signals recovered from the baseband processing in the radio receiver are conventionally in a high speed serial data format. The transport layer for this high speed serial data is specified in the Bluetooth specification as using either USB, RS232 or UART. For a variety of reasons it is not feasible to include substantial error detecting or correcting facilities in such a format and accordingly it is not desirable to have any substantial physical separation between the radio section of the node and the high level packet processing section.